More Awesome Than You!

Here are some familiar faces.  They are the first eight original EA sim in the sim bin.  These pics are taken in CAS with the chin sliders selected.  Neither awesomemod nor Rick&Delphy's slider hack are installed for these pics.

(http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/2228/chins.jpg)

Notice anything interesting about the chin depth slider, the first of the three sliders?  Almost all the EA faces in the sim bin have the slider all the way to the left, or almost all the way.

I have complained before that the awesomemod doesn't allow us to increase the chin depth slider to the left.  I tried out Rick&Delphy's slider hack tonight just to see if it was any different.  Same thing.  And then it occurred to me to look at the faces in CAS without any of those hacks.

The same faces, when seen with Rick&Delphy's slider hack installed, show the slider EVEN FURTHER to the left.  The same is true with awesomemod.  Apparently there is no way to increase chin depth further than what EA has allowed, possibly because of some programming boundary condition that borks the game.  I don't know. 

But it also seems that even EA's jocks, when making faces, couldn't get past the fact that anything too far from the extreme left limit makes the faces look peculiar to downright monstrous.  I didn't bother to post any pics of faces you can make by moving the slider to the right, but they are all awful.

I noticed that it does much the same thing when you generate a random face or sim -- it generates a sim with different slider positions but with the chin depth slider all the way, or almost all the way to the left.  So this bias is even built into the randomizer.

And THAT is one more pitiful reason that we are limited in the kinds of faces we can make.

I feel your pain. 

I only want celebrity sims in my game and trying to make them look anything like what they are supposed to look like is beyond challenging, especially when EA have left out a significant number of sliders (See my post for expansion on that).

I believe the chin depth slider stops where it does because the chin depth slider minimum is zero, which is why when you expand the available range and INCREASE the of chinness, the slider appears to be squashed closer to the left, because it is zero. For instance, let's say the range of a slider is 0 to 10. Giving it a value of "5" means that your slider floats in the middle. Now we expand the range by multiplying the range values by 2, so the slider becomes 0 to 20. Our previously set value is still 5, but now it is only one quarter of the slider domain, so it is 1/4th of the way from the end instead.

Thank you, Pescado.  I said something similar in another post somewhere.  However, the pics above are without any cas slider scale increase.  So there's a whole other issue involved.  It's that there are very few useful things you can do with the chin depth slider at all, whether or not the scale is increased, because the absolute minimum setting still makes a prominent chin.  And EA must at some point have realized this because their own randomizer creates one random face after another with chin depth of zero.

In the pics above, you may notice there is one EA face that doesn't have a nill chin depth -- the blonde in the center, who has a very pointy chin.  Move her chin slider further to the right, and she'd put an eye out.

Here are three random sims I made with the randomizer last night.
(http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/3205/69293064.jpg)

Before I started taking screen caps, I made several more and noticed the trend.  That's what got me interested in trying out Rick&Delphy's hack and in just removing all slider hacks to see what was causing this.  Apparently it's a base game inadequacy.

I don't know if it's just me, but your example pictures aren't showing up, Doc.